Coaching the Post-heroic Leader

This is a tough time to be a leader. It is no longer enough to be charismatic, visionary and decisive. Leaders today are asked to be inclusive, collaborative consensus-builders with high levels of emotional intelligence and self-awareness. As inhabitants of the C-suite become more diverse, the paradigm of patriarchy is crumbling. Industrial and social psychologists are observing the emergence of a new post-patriarchal, or “post-heroic,” breed of leadership that is democratic, empathetic and communitarian. Leadership Coaches are tasked with supporting clients as they build this broader set of competencies.

To support coaches in accomplishing this goal, I developed a framework for assessment based on recent research in nine specific domains of leadership that represent “shifts” from a pre- to post-heroic leadership landscape (see above). In this article, we’ll take a quick tour of the nine shifts addressed in the assessment.

1. Action to Being

As trait-based, charismatic and situational theories of leadership evolve toward process-driven, adaptive and gender-neutral approaches, type-A assertive behavior is being augmented with the proven value of listening, balance, resilience, calm and presence. Thanks to the work of Richard Boyatzis and Daniel Goleman, an understanding of emotional intelligence’s importance has entered the mainstream. As a result, self-regulation, empathy, social skills and self-awareness are becoming key indicators of leadership effectiveness, especially in situations where a team needs to think outside the box and not just play politics with a boss who makes all the decisions. That’s not to say that decisive, take-charge leadership no longer has value: There is a time and place for both.

2. Vision to Presence

In the late 1990s, one of my regular gigs involved facilitating lengthy debates over mission and vision statements, which would ultimately get boiled down to variations on “We are the best … .” Today, most leaders realize what I suspected back then: By itself, the mighty mission statement doesn’t motivate workers. Without an emotional connection—a core sense of meaning and aspiration—humans are not moved to act.

Twenty-first-century leaders must be mindful, connected and present to what is happening now. Ellen Langer and Dan Siegel have studied the impact of mindfulness on organizations and leaders for many years. What they have found is slowly making its way into boardrooms around the globe: The ability to drop into a mindful brain state, where one is not analyzing or planning but is instead observing thoughts and sensations, produces a state of presence where new ways of seeing emerge. All truly powerful vision is actually about the present, not the future. People are moved by how a leader expresses a core sense of what’s possible right now. From this place of centered and focused presence, ideas that will transform the future are born.

3. Ego to Eco Awareness

Otto Scharmer, founder of MIT’s Presencing Institute, has written about a crucial mind-shift taking place for today’s most effective leaders at individual, organizational and global levels. It’s the move from an I-based awareness (ego perspective) to what he calls an “eco-awareness.” For leaders who embrace their role as a unifier and force of inspiration, Scharmer says this eco-awareness “creates a more empathic and generative quality of collective attention than people are used to experiencing, where too often we simply debate and re-confirm what we already know.”

There will always be a need for strong, independent and self-assured—some might even say egocentric—leadership, especially in times of crisis. Yet, more and more often, today’s real leadership challenge lies in bringing together the full panoply of talents a team or an organization can leverage to solve a problem. This collective dynamic is where an eco-aware leader can shine, bringing people together into a systemic sense of cohesion, collaboration and unity.

4. Ethical to Authentic

As a core attribute of effective leadership for many years, ethical thought and behavior is as important today as ever. Yet, if we look beneath the surface of traditional business ethics, we find a strong bias toward black-and-white thinking. In a traditional hierarchy, the leader is the ultimate arbiter of right or wrong, and there is typically one directive to follow: “My way or the highway.” As Harvard Business School’s Bill George writes, today’s leaders need not be simply ethical, but authentic. Authentic leaders operate in a more nuanced way; they reflect on decisions from the inside out, using an internal, moral compass and scanning for feedback from peers, subordinates and the environment.

The difference is subtle but crucial: Authentic leaders need to make difficult decisions based on listening, consensus and intuition. They need, at times, to acknowledge vulnerability and the limitations of their knowledge, yet still take a strong stand. Authenticity is more challenging than simple judgments of right and wrong, because today’s world is far too complex and there are rarely any easy answers.

5. Knowledge to Wisdom

In my last corporate job, I worked as a consultant in a firm whose motto at the time was, “Everything that can be known, can be measured.” It was a great conceit and a great marketing tool, but it was based on a false premise: that objective knowledge would always win out. Today, we know better.

Knowledge is important, and a good leader will strive to expand his or her foundation of facts, theory and data, keeping up with the latest research in a wide range of fields. Yet wisdom, in a post-heroic world, calls forth a different stance: knowing what you don’t know and learning to be facile with your internal landscape of thoughts, feelings, and judgments. As Edgar Schein writes, to dwell in the unknown, asking deep and provocative questions, rather than espousing answers, is a more powerful, inspirational and, ultimately, wise ground from which to lead.

6. Power to Strength

Traditional hierarchical structures and leadership models espouse “carrot-and-stick” approaches to motivation and the exercise of power over others to spur action. But does this dynamic of power over really work in today’s organizations, where idea generation and continuous learning are typically more important than filing one-by-one behind the boss? The evidence shows otherwise. Research by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan has shown repeatedly that sustainable motivation emerges through self-determination and autonomy.

Coaches need to support leaders in shifting toward this “power with” approach to performance improvement, which includes extrinsic rewards at appropriate moments but also creates the conditions for a self-empowering, self-authoring path toward excellence and personal growth. Ultimately, self-confidence is the strongest predictor of success. Post-heroic leaders must nurture the conditions for motivation through the inner strength of role modeling—coaching, mentoring, supporting—not through the antiquated, top-down exertion of power.

7. Innovation to Creativity

Psychologist Todd Kashdan asserts that curiosity is a primary driver of human well-being, writing, “Curiosity … is the engine of our evolving self. Without curiosity, we are unable to sustain our attention, we avoid risks, we abort challenging tasks, we compromise our intellectual development … In a word, we fail to grow.” Yet if we reflect on a typical work environment where “innovation” is a prescribed goal, many of the outdated, mechanistic, structured processes snuff out curiosity at every turn.

Psychologist Shelley Carson’s work on the neuroscience of the creative brain is helping turn the leadership focus away from “structured innovation” toward free-flowing and seemingly chaotic, yet networked, mind states that optimize the organic connectivity of the human brain. Leaders who strive to foster creativity need support from coaches who are familiar with the science, who can assist them in “breaking down the walls” of programmatic or coercive tactics that undermine rather than foster innovation. Post-heroic leaders, seeking the next great wave of innovative ideas, will want to nurture individual/ group brain states that unleash the human imagination: fluid, unstructured, open, welcoming spaces with neon signs flashing, “Humans at play.”

8. Diversity to Community

One of the most up-to-the-minute leadership attributes being touted by diversity experts is what Goleman calls “social awareness.” Not unlike the eco-consciousness Scharmer describes, but with a twist, social awareness entails becoming aware of the unique commonalities and differences within individuals from a wide range of cultures, races, backgrounds and histories. Coaches need to be facile at gently supporting clients to examine how their own history may have shaped their views of others.

For coaches, the challenge is to nurture a safe space where potential post-heroic leaders can uncover their unconscious biases; become aware of hidden narratives around oppression, privilege, race and gender; and evolve beyond mere tolerance to fully embrace the extraordinary community of “otherness” represented by a global work force. By raising the bar on social awareness, leaders can not only engender an environment of respect and support in which their team members can thrive, they can call forth perhaps hitherto unknown reserves of creativity and insight from the most diverse pool of talent the world has ever known.

9. Teamwork to Teaming

Knowledge-based teams are different. They do not always operate best when built around bounded structures with strict definitions of who’s in and who’s out. They do not focus exclusively on beating the competition, touting individual “stars,” or promoting conformity and sameness. As Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School writes, for knowledge-based teams today, “… teaming is a verb. It is a dynamic activity, not a bounded, static entity …Teaming blends relating to people, listening to other points of view, coordinating actions and making shared decisions.” Leaders who wish to optimize team dynamics today need to know how to do “teaming,” not team-building.

Knowledge workers and millennials with sought-after skills in business, engineering, science, math and medicine are quick to move around, quick to move out and quick to note if their team is functioning optimally under a boss who “gets it.” If they feel stymied, unheard, overly structured or micromanaged—even with a leader who has the best of intentions—the likelihood of that team remaining in prime operating mode for very long is small. Simply put, a traditional, heroic leader may find him or herself captain of a ship without a crew.

So for the emergent post-heroic leader, and his or her coach, the dilemma of teamwork is clear: How do I “run” the show, motivate the team and focus on the goal of winning if truly high performance is determined by a very different set of organization dynamics: permeability, flexibility, collaboration and a willingness to fail and learn fast?

It would appear that the tectonic plates of traditional leadership theory are adrift. Yet, in the midst of upheaval, there is also great opportunity. Post-heroic leaders, who help employees express their creativity and potential by listening and guiding, rather than commanding, will emerge with high-performing, dynamic and creative teams. For coaches, the challenge is to accelerate the shift: to listen, to support, and to coax from leaders greater self-awareness, inclusiveness, empathy and a willingness to experiment and take risks. And with tools like the one discussed here, coaches can do even more, becoming a practical bridge to the latest research and bringing science out of the academy and into the C-suite.